skopia
Oscar is an overweight Dominican nerd in New Jersey, desperate for love and buried in fantasy novels. Díaz runs his family through Trujillo's dictatorship in footnotes where history and comic books collide.
Sara Smolinsky's father studies Torah in a Lower East Side tenement while her mother takes in boarders and he marries her sisters to men they dread. She leaves at seventeen for night school.
Arturo Bandini starves in a Bunker Hill hotel in Depression Los Angeles, wanting to be a great writer and loving a Mexican waitress he cannot stop insulting. Bukowski called Fante his god.
Nine stories of Indians and Indian Americans living between two countries, told with a calm that makes the losses land late. A married couple confess things to each other during nightly power cuts.
Jurgis Rudkus comes from Lithuania to work Chicago's killing floors, and the packing plants destroy his family while diseased meat ships out. Roosevelt read it and Congress passed federal food inspection within months.
Jim Burden arrives orphaned in Nebraska and finds Antonia Shimerda, an immigrant girl whose family is barely surviving the winter. Cather writes the prairie so well the book reads like your own childhood.